We have already learned
that she had come to like people's liking her to "know." Before he
could reply at all, none the less, her mother opened a pair of arms of
extraordinary elegance, and then she felt the loosening of his grasp.
"My own child," Ida murmured in a voice--a voice of sudden confused
tenderness--that it seemed to her she heard for the first time. She
wavered but an instant, thrilled with the first direct appeal, as
distinguished from the mere maternal pull, she had ever had from lips
that, even in the old vociferous years, had always been sharp. The next
moment she was on her mother's breast, where, amid a wilderness of
trinkets, she felt as if she had suddenly been thrust, with a smash of
glass, into a jeweller's shop-front, but only to be as suddenly ejected
with a push and the brisk injunction: "Now go to the Captain!"
Maisie glanced at the gentleman submissively, but felt the want of more
introduction. "The Captain?"
Sir Claude broke into a laugh. "I told her it was the Count."
Ida stared; she rose so superior that she was colossal. "You're too
utterly loathsome," she then declared. "Be off!" she repeated to her
daughter.
Maisie started, moved backward and, looking at Sir Claude, "Only for a
moment," she signed to him in her bewilderment. But he was too angry
to heed her--too angry with his wife; as she turned away she heard his
anger break out. "You damned old b----"--she couldn't quite hear all.
It was enough, it was too much: she fled before it, rushing even to a
stranger for the shock of such a change of tone.
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